Permafrost People
The Ground is moving at a slow place but the effects can be seen with the slightest movement.
Greenland has 79 permafrost settlements with a population of little more than 54.000 people in all. This number is predicted to be reduced to 17 settlements and a population of 12554 by year 2050.
Sisimiut lies just a little above the arctic circle on the west coast of Greenland and has sporadic permafrost zones which also affects the infrastructure in the cities when permafrost thaws. By sporadic permafrost zones it means that the ground or the soils under the active layer or the top soil freezes at irregular intervals of time.
There has also been some houses which are in bad shape due to neglect and permafrost thaw . But they have been abondoned by the owners. Few older constructions are still inhabited but require repairs to make them liveable.
While going in a cars it feels like a sailing on waves when you drive on the roads of Sisimiut, Greenland thats how uneven the roads have become. In the past 5-6 years the road infrastructure have required more repairs than ever.
The football field in Sisimiut is in very bad condition, the field is likely beyond repair. If the field is to stay in the same location, one would need to excavate deep into the ground to establish a sufficiently stable foundation – so deep that the expenses would be so big that it doesn’t make financially sense to do. Rather, it should be moved to a new location. The problem is now to find a good, central and stable location for the new field.
Michaela Eliassen has been born and brought up in Sisimiut
and has been living there was past 30 years.
She says “ And I moved in this house in June 2023.I got it
painted in June 2023. I saw the roof cracking at multiple
places in just 5 months.You can see the house is deeper in the
middle and higher in the sides and cracking on the doors and
the windows.”
Permafrost thaw has increased her cost of living now. She has to
spend more on repairs and more on heating oil. The house is not
warm enough because the heat escapes from the cracks and the
gaps.
“There is limited knowledge about permafrost in Greenland, and the focus of our
work is to gain an understanding of the permafrost distribution in Greenland,
both north to south along the coast, but also how the permafrost changes as you
move from the Ice Sheet out towards the coast. We both work with permafrost
in sediments and bedrock. Our findings are valuable both from an infrastructure
point of view (understanding how the permafrost reacts when you build buildings,
roads, etc. on top of it), as well as risk mitigation (destabilization of bedrock/
rockwalls as the permafrost thaws, likely what happened with the landslide in
the Karrat fjord in 2017, which flooded a settlement north of the Disco bay in
Greenland – you can find articles and reports about this online).
As the global temperatures rise, and especially the temperatures at the poles
rise, more and more permafrost will thaw. When permafrost thaws, it changes
the mechanical properties of the ground, which will lead to destabilization of the
ground. If this is in sediments, in towns with buildings and roads, this will lead to
settlement damages of this infrastructure, which can in the worst case result in
houses getting damaged to a degree where you cannot live in them, and roads/
airport runways/pipelines etc. to be damaged to a degree where they become
out of service. If the permafrost in rockwalls thaw, these can also see a significant
decrease in stability (again referering to the land slide in Karrat fjord).”
Anton Berggreen Abrahamsen
Research Assistant
Arctic DTU